How women spend an extra $849,000 over a lifetime just for being born female (and no, it"s not for designer shoes)

How women spend an extra $849,000 over a lifetime just for being born female (and no, it's not for designer shoes)

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UPDATED:

22:24 GMT, 16 July 2012

Women live longer than men, earn less and take more breaks from the workplace to care for children and elderly parents, which all add up to scary financial penalties.

Totaling an extra $849,000 over a lifetime, purely for being born a woman, AOL put these monetary disadvantages in black and white dollar terms.

The average total is made up of life expectancy and higher insurance costs, the price of taking time off work, lower wages and the general added hardship of female finances.

Female expenses: Women live longer than men, earn less and take more breaks from the workplace to care for children, which adds up to a $849,000 penalty

According to research, a woman's life expectancy adds extra costs of $200,000 in total.

Women live longer than men by an average of five years, and in today's dollars, an average person needs approximately $3,500 per month to get by. This totals an average of more than $200,00 needed in extra retirement savings compared to a man, purely due to statistical longevity.

A woman's need to take more time out of the workforce to raise children, care for sick or elderly parents and tend to other family matters totals $80,000, resulting in lost income and depleted savings.

For a hypothetical job, with a $40,000 annual salary, just two years out of work means a woman is already $80,000 in the red versus her male counterpart.

Less time in the workforce also leaves women fewer dollars for social security pensions, and other retirement income

A gender bias also exists in health insurance, where women typically pay 30per cent more than men in premiums.

According to a report cited in the New York Times, more than 90per cent of the best selling health insurance plans charge women more than men.

For example, a $300 per month premium policy for a woman might cost a man $210 per month. This difference adds up roughly to $44,000 over a lifetime spanning from post-college age to the time one is eligible for Medicare.

Another gap is the inequality in annual salaries. Women often get paid less for the same work and in some cases, women get paid 66 cents for every dollar their male counterparts make.

For some occupations, this figure is closer to 77 cents per dollar, but on average, there is a 23per cent wage penalty due to ones gender.

This adds up to approximately $10,000 per year over a working life, again assuming a $40,000 salary, which translates into $400,00 over the course of a 40-year-career.

Pricier long-term care coverage is also an added $125,000 women have to bare.

A woman has a 50per cent chance that at some point in her life, she will need long-term care – meaning a period of at least 90 days when she requires assistance with activities like dressing, eating and bathing.

Those odds are greater than her male counterparts, and a women typically spends three years longer needing long-term care as a man.

At a national average rate of $3,477 per month for assisted-living long-term care, this equals roughly $125,000.

Women who are suddenly single, like divorcees and widows, obviously are at an immediate disadvantage.

And singles, in general, may have special needs, like disability insurance, because they don’t have a spouse’s paycheck to fall back on (though you can make the same case for single men).

Because of a divorce or death of a spouse or partner, 90per cent of women, who at one time had a second household income, will be left to handle the burden on their own later in life.